When my brother and I were kids, there was this one flowering succulent in our front yard that we called the “hot chocolate plant” for her dried flowers were a lovely rich brown in winter, just the colour of hot cocoa in frothy milk. This plant, I have since learned, goes by the likewise delicious name witch’s moneybags.
We would watch the bumble bees at its flowers and, if memory serves, we actually used to pet their little bee bums while they filled their pockets with pollen and nectar.
This memory came tumbling over me last week as I sat out front of our apartment building with Ben. He was entranced, watching the bumble bees and metallic green sweat bees flit from Hollyhock to Aster and back again, getting the last of summer’s gifts.
I felt like we were getting it, too. It was an incredibly peaceful moment, simply to sit and be at home “in the family of things”¹. As it often does, watching the bees gave rise to another thought – ecosystems everywhere!
Just like the air we breathe, our bodies are home to bacteria, fungi and viruses that outnumber our own human cells. We are ecosystems upon ecosystems.²
As a vocalist I get nerdy about breath, so bear with me for a moment. There is a deliciously unanswerable question about when exactly air becomes a part of our bodies — When it touches our skin? When it’s ‘in’ our nose or mouth? When its oxygen molecules pass across one of the hundreds of millions of alveoli in our lungs and into our bloodstream?³
Just by pausing to sit with our breath, the depths and complexity of our interdependence begin to unravel. And the real treat is the realization that we are only at the beginning of our understanding.
As we prepared to celebrate the impending release of Salt with a 10-piece ensemble show last Saturday, I was overcome with feelings of gratitude. Now there's a theme that comes up frequently in the Full Moon News, but I do not think it can be overstated.
Nothing is self-made. And this is especially true of our musical offerings as a band. They are made in community, at the table of our ancestors, as guests here living along the Ottawa river watershed, and with so much help.
Albums are a funny time capsule and this one took us upwards of five years to make from the moment we decided to record just a handful of the songs you’ll hear on Salt. In truth, it started long before that. And, as the music reaches ears over and over again, it will carry on. Soon it will be out of our hands, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
When I sit and watch the bees at the flowers year after year I am comforted that the slow-moving dance of interdependence is not to be lamented. It is a celebration. It is part of the magic of how our ecosystems work.
xo
Kait
P.S. Just want to acknowledge that it’s not the full moon, nor the new moon either. And Waning Gibbous Moon News doesn’t really have that je-ne-sais-quoi. But here’s to those nearly-there vibes!
¹ Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”, Dream Work, 1986.
² https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/humans-are-not-separate-from-nature
³ https://www.lung.ca/lung-health/lung-info/how-your-lungs-work